Congratulations to Linda Duncan

Linda Duncan is smart, experienced, and hard-working. She's one of Canada's most prominent environmentalists, and of course she's also now the Member of Parliament for Edmonton-Strathcona!

A couple of weeks ago, I gave her a one in a hundred chance of taking the riding (after all, this is Alberta). The weekend before the election, though, I started to really think she might have a chance. The clue came in my mailbox in the form of an insulting-to-the-intelligence postcard dropped off by the Rahim Jaffer campaign. The message basically amounted to "the NDP thinks that car thieves shouldn't go to jail". The fact that Jaffer was using the logic of a nine-year-old in a negative ad like that indicated to me that he was running scared.

The public tantrum and last-gasp cry for attention that followed from Jaffer just confirmed that the people of Edmonton-Strathcona made the right choice.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Duncan be named the NDP's environment critic. Her election is a refreshing dot of orange in a province that was supposed to be a sea of blue this time around. Thank you to Edmonton-Strathcona voters for making an environmentally-sound choice of representatives, and congratulations to Linda Duncan!